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Special Report

The story behind the new $100-million GE-Wyoming coal gasification project goes back to the early 1980s when a then-California-based energy company, Tosco, was trying to extract fuel from massive oil shale deposits outside Grand Junction, Colorado.

The challenge at the time, former Tosco CEO Morton Winston recalled in an interview with WyoFile.com, was to build a device that could introduce precisely measured amounts of crushed oil shale into a mildly pressurized chamber. Winston turned to a brilliant British mechanical engineer named Donald Firth for help. [more]

WESTERN BOOK ROUNDUP

This years National Outdoor Book Awards honor crusaders to save the American chestnut tree, Grand Canyon explorers and the widow of mountaineer Alex Lowe, rebuilding her life after the death of her husband in a Himalayan mountaineering accident.

“What a year it was,” says Ron Watters, professor emeritus at Idaho State University. “The writing in the outdoor field has always been good, but it just keeps getting better – and this year it was outstanding.” [more]

Update

For more than 20 years, the Mitchell Slough in Montana's Bitterroot Valley has become a showcase of the battle between public access and private property rights and Monday the Montana Supreme Court ruled in favor of the former.

With a 54-page ruling, the Supreme Court deemed the waterway a natural stream, which means access to it is protected by Montana's stream access law, which is among the strongest in the country. The ruling has been coming for more than two years and overturns two lower-court decisions that had defined the stream the way the Bitterroot Conservation District and several high-profile landowners had advocated it be: Just a ditch.

The case, which has been watched closely across the West as a crucial test of stream access law, has been a long-running extravaganza of protests, celebrity, and political maneuvering but more than that, it has been a spur for complex and often heated discussions on water rights, landownership, what's natural and what's not and most of all, how to square the values of the Old West with the demands of the New.

The Ravalli Republic's Perry Backus has a detailed story on yesterday's ruling here and to catch up on the case and it's implications, Greg Lemon wrote a very good primer for NewWest.Net when the case first went to the high court. [more]

News Brief

The Associated Press' Matthew Brown today details how the credit crunch is squeezing the nation's power industry, focusing on a hot-button coal-fired plant near Great Falls, Montana.

Brown reports:

If credit woes put the brakes on scores of proposed plants, observers say a shift to other, more expensive fuels could end up soaking customers. The alternative is more frequent and potentially extended outages.

MICROBREW MONTANA

One thing I didn't expect to find when I launched into the Microbrew Montana series was a brewery with a maritime theme. But then, I didn't know about Neptune's Brewery in Livingston, the self-proclaimed "Heart of the Rocky Mountains," and a small market (8,000 population) for a brewery. At Neptune's, everything is about the ocean, ships, sailing and maritime culture and lore--the logo, art, taproom furnishings, beer names, even the owner's only employee, Katrina.

You'd think a brewery in Livingston would feature a ranching or outdoor theme, or maybe even a movie star aura to appeal to all the local stars who have escaped Hollywood and landed in the Paradise Valley. So, of course, I had to ask why. [more]

08 Presidential Election

A new report from the Center for Rural Strategies and our friends over at the online journal the Daily Yonder released a report this week that details who flipped where in last week's presidential election.

In all, 372 counties "flipped" parties from 2004, a majority of them going from Republican to Democrat. The data shows the Midwest played a huge role in the tip for Sen. Barack Obama and overall, rural counties provided a big boost.

In the Rocky Mountain West 21 counties flipped, all of them to Democrat. Of those 21 counties, 16 are considered "rural," including three in Colorado, two in Idaho, five in Montana, four in New Mexico and one each in Utah and Wyoming. [more]

Tales From Bankruptcy Court

A Montana bankruptcy judge reluctantly breathed three weeks of life into the Yellowstone Club in a Missoula courtroom Thursday when he OK'd a three-week loan to keep the club operating during the next stage of bankruptcy hearings.

"Why am I doing this?" asked U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Ralph B. Kirscher, who called it "troubling" and "overkill" that his order included the terms and conditions of a $4.4 million temporary bailout loan from lender Credit Suisse to the luxurious-but-broke private club.

"What happens if I don't sign this order?" Kirscher said. "If you would have asked me at one o'clock last night, I would have said, 'This isn't going to get signed. I'll let things fall where they may.'" [more]

News Analysis

It's an odd twist of fate that the Blixseth who was sitting in the witness chair in a Missoula federal courthouse Wednesday was named Edra. Sure, Edra Blixseth is nominally the owner of the Yellowstone Club, the uber-exclusive resort near Big Sky that's now mired in bankruptcy. She thus bears much of the responsibility for trying to sort out the mess, even though her equity in the club is almost certainly worthless and lender Credit Suisse effectively controls the property. She's been involved with the venture from the beginning, and is certainly no business neophyte.

Yet as everyone familiar with the situation knows all too well, the Blixseth who built the Yellowstone Club, the person who persuaded the likes of Bill Gates to join up, the person whose non-stop, on-the-edge deal-making both made the club possible and created its current predicament, is named Tim. His sudden absence from the scene is strange; dozens of lawyers, thousands of pages of legal filings, a financial fiasco of major proportions -- and hardly a word about Tim. [more]

Poor Little Rich Club

Once touted as the world's pre-eminent leisure community for the mega-rich, with billionaires from Bill Gates on down among its members, the Yellowstone Club near Big Sky, Montana, doesn’t have enough cash in the bank to buy propane, owner Edra Blixseth said in bankruptcy court in Missoula Wednesday.

The four companies that operate collectively as the Yellowstone Club filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Montana on Monday, citing debts of about $360 million, most of it owed to a consortium of lenders led by international bank Credit Suisse. Chapter 11 allows a business to operate while it reorganizes its debt, and in this case the bankruptcy filing comes in the wake of an ugly divorce, allegations of large-scale financial impropriety, and a complete meltdown of the high-end real estate market and the credit markets that funded it.

The club doesn't have enough cash to make its $600,000 monthly payroll for its 521 employees or to buy food for its restaurants, or for the electricity needed to operate the chairlifts at its storied private ski area. Last week, the club's checking account had only about $40,000.

[more]

Guest Column

Every four years those of us living in the Intermountain West --a largely federal landscape filled with vast potential and spectacular resources -- find ourselves wondering who will be appointed as our new landlord, and why.

Past Secretaries of the Interior have been assigned an acutely partisan and political role, typically delivered as a reward to a former Governor or loyal ideologue. This triggers a vicious cycle. A Dirk Kempthorne or Gale Norton sets out to undo the work of a Bruce Babbitt, who reversed James Watt’s extremes, who in turn tried to roll back the legacy of Cecil Andrus. The next appointment to Interior can continue to whipsaw the West, offering more of the same, or provide it with a deep-rooted, nonpartisan voice of pragmatism and stability.

Here in the American West, there is no more respected conservation leader than Utah writer and natural historian, Terry Tempest Williams. [more]

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